Nella Larsen Read Online Free PDF Page A

introduced to Irene, who muses over a letter addressed in a handwriting she recognizes to be that of her mysterious friend. This “scene of reading,” as it were, establishes a structural equivalence between Irene and the reader on the one hand and Clare’s letter and Larsen’s text on the other.
    Unlike Deborah McDowell, who reads the envelope as a “metaphoric vagina,” I am more inclined to agree with Claudia Tate that it functions as a kind of foreshadowing device, an Eliotian “objective correlative” of Clare’s character “daring defiance of unwritten codes of social propriety.” 51 Beyond the letter’s metonymic significance, however, I would suggest that the
unopened
envelope—while broadly signifying the dangers of writing—functions, paradoxically, as a metaphor of concealment and
safe enclosure.
Thus the enclosed content of the envelope would figure, on one level, as the
textual unconscious—
that which is risky, unsafe, or menacing. Irene, as addressee, then, faces the challenge of opening the letter and confronting the potential dangers of the
psychic unconscious.
    The structural parallels between Irene/the reader and Clare’s letter/Larsen’s text provide an early narrative clue on how to read Larsen’s novel. What the reader/critic subsequently recognizes is that, for Irene, Clare embodies a “performative” text, and more precisely, the performativity of what legal historian Eva Saks elsewhere describes as “the miscegenous body.” 52 Clare (whose name means “light”) performs “whiteness” and suppresses “blackness” in the “miscegenous body”—a body in which the “races” (
genus
) are mixed (
miscere
). The contents of Clare’s letters articulate the “black” text concealed within the “white” body, expressing her despair with “this pale life” and her “longing . . . for that other. . . .” At the heart of Larsen’s novel, then, is Irene’s
readerly performance
juxtaposed to Clare’s
textual performance.
Clare as text—as performative text—becomes a work of art and artifice (“one got . . . [an] aesthetic pleasure from watching her”), and, as such, an object of
desire
and
knowing
for Irene and the spectatorial reader. And it is here, in the realm of desire for knowledge (of Self and Other), rather than in latent lesbian desire, that I would locate Clare’s true seductiveness for Irene—as well as the seductiveness of the text for the reader. 53 Like Balzac’s Zambinella, Clare functions as an illusion, an actress, a sign, a performer who epitomizes not only difference, but the unrepresentability of difference when it is coded as the miscegenous body. Clare’s body, figured in the body of the letter, remains an indecipherable text, an illegible sign, an object of knowledge to be “read,” repressed, and, finally, repudiated by Irene. Fundamentally coded as surface and artifice, Clare is produced primarily as “affect.” When, for example, Irene visits Clare at the exclusive Morgan, she discovers herself in a sitting-room, large and high, at whose windows hung startlingly blue draperies which triumphantly dragged attention from the gloomy chocolate-colored furniture. And Clare was wearing a thin floating dress of the same shade of blue, which suited her and the rather difficult room to perfection.
    Elsewhere, Clare “[sits] with an air of indifferent assurance, as if arranged for, desired.” In these passages, the combination of posture, costume, set, and props, as it were, contrives to achieve a spectacularly dramatic effect in which Clare gets featured stage center.
    The opening scene also alerts the reader to the importance of the materiality of the letter (and perhaps, belles lettres). Significantly, here it is not so much the signified (content) as the